Kevin Howell

A Good Book, Not THE Good Book
April 13, 2007

Last year I was so outraged that ABC decided that instead of running its annual showing of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, they would remake the film (and presumably make more money when they began running it every Easter). Finding myself Commandment-less, I bought the 1956 movie on DVD.

I’m a DVD whore. I devour them. I’m the guy who watches all the extras and who listens to all commentary tracks. The Ten Commandments runs three hours and 40 minutes without commercials, so after I watched it in all its digitally restored glory, I thought I would wait a while before checking on the feature-length commentary track by Katherine Orrison, who authored the book Written in Stone: Making Cecil B. DeMille’s Epic The Ten Commandments. Of course, that resolve lasted a few minutes before I decided to sample the commentary by jumping to the scene with the parting of the Red Sea. Orrison was so fascinating that I ended up starting the movie from the beginning and watching the entire film again listening to her narration.

Creating a compelling commentary for a DVD is a real talent and one that many directors and actors don’t possess. But Katherine Orrison’s commentary track was informative, amusing, knowledgeable (both in the behind-the-scenes filmmaking sense and also in the biblical sense of being able to compare DeMille’s version with what is in the original source material) and filled with the energy of a person who wants to share their passion. There was never a lull of silence during the whole 220 minutes and it did the near-impossible. It made me see a movie I’d watched more than a dozen times through different eyes.

Of course, I ordered her book. Written in Stone is fairly trim considering the vastness of the project. But in less than 200 pages, you learn virtually everything you’d ever want to know about the production of this movie from conception to marketing and promoting the film when it was released.

It’s filled with fascinating tales. DeMille’s initial casting choices are so different from his final choices that it makes you wonder what the movie would have been like with a different cast. His first choice for Moses wasn’t Charlton Heston but William “Hopalong Cassidy” Boyd, who was in his mid-50s at the time. Jack Palance was set to play Ramses before his agent played hardball and Yul Brynner stepped in. Can you imagine Moses’s wife played by Shirley Booth rather than glamorous Yvonne DeCarlo?  And DeMille passed on Audrey Hepburn for Nefretiri, the role that then went to Anne Baxter.

Orrison’s book is composed of a series of first-person oral histories she creates through extensive interviews with surviving cast and crew members including composer Elmer Bernstein, special effects wizard William Sapp, screenwriter Jesse Lasky, Jr. and associate producer Henry Wilcoxon. The Ten Commandments has always been a guilty pleasure...yeah, it's overlong and over-the-top, but who can fight the nonstop spectacle? Orison's whole-hearted enthusiasm makes the film even more pleasurable and lessens the guilt.

Posted by Kevin Howell on April 13, 2007 | Comments (0)